I wish I could be as excited as the title of this entry would tend to imply. We pretty much pugged our way in late Saturday night and broke down the city doors around 1am. Later today we were back there around 4pm.
I also wish I could think of something cool or great to say about the city visits. There are two types of reward that players look for in a game: experience or material reward. The experience of playing through something cool and impressive. The reward of shiny items that make their in-game avatar better at some function or other, or simply provide an entertaining piece of fluff. In theory, the endgame experience should be rewarding in and of itself. Garnering loot is a large factor for many but most would agree that you want the process of gaining such rewards to have a large fun factor, even if the details of that fun may vary. Taking it further, one would expect the culmination of a lot of hard teamwork to be the best a game has to offer. Something that makes you feel your time was well spent, that the experience of getting there was worth it and if lucky, that the loot you take away reflects your track record of in-game awesomeness.
The city implementations in Warhammer miss this target by quite a large amount and many players (at least on Karak-Norn) are questioning why they would want to bother. Quite a few in our alliance alone have said they are up for the zone pushing and various RvR that make up T4 PvP in Warhammer but should we push all the way to the enemy city they’ll go find something else to do.
A rather damning indictment of what should be the culminating triumph of Warhammer.
The fun is from pushing the zones and objectives. Once you get to a city you pretty much do it because thats all there is to do until the city resets, if you want to RvR anyway. After you’ve done the tour of the city once or twice its a rather dull afair accompanied by outrageous lag and varying levels of frustration. There are minor moments of fun when you get to battle enemy players but usually its a case of whoever has the most numbers at that particular point in the zone, or whoever can get spells/abilities cast by button-mashing guesswork.
On Saturday’s late push there was nobody to fight. We just did the PQs a few times. While a bit dull, it did mean we were able to experience the city instance without lag for the first time ever. The city victory points didn’t budge the whole time we were there.
On the Sunday afternoon visit to Altdorf it was rather dreadful and all the poor design choices are thrown into sharp relief. I’ve mentioned them in previous blog entries, there’s no need to go over old ground.
At a guess, the pressure is on for the Land of the Dead to be the successor to Darkness Falls that everyone is hoping because for many players its the last chance for Mythic to prove they can deliver some kind of quality product with satisfying endgame content. My guess is that they are pinning their hopes on this to buy time for them to work on city sieges and forts.
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